


Skeletons

by Eatsscissors



Category: Moonlight (TV)
Genre: F/M, Funerals, Partner Betrayal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-03
Updated: 2010-06-03
Packaged: 2017-10-09 21:51:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/91978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eatsscissors/pseuds/Eatsscissors
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beth and Carl grieve for a friend.  Through 1.11-"Love Lasts Forever."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Skeletons

Carl comes to the funeral. Beth would expect nothing else. They stand on opposite sides of the ground's dark mouth, watch as Josh is lowered into it, do not make eye contact with one another. Beth can feel Mick's eyes on her as he stands in the protective shade of an oak tree while she grieves in the bright sunshine, but she does not turn her head. Neither does she acknowledge that Carl has noticed Mick, as well, and knows him well enough to understand that he does not belong here. They used to be better than this, good enough friends, before they became more than friends, that Carl would have heard most of the details of her strange not-relationship with Mick from Beth's own lips. It startles her, and saddens her, too, to realize that Carl and Josh managed to repair themselves that far.

Beth stalwartly does not look at that figure beneath the trees, her angel still, as the preacher speaks about Josh going to join a different sort of angel now. She thinks that she has had her fill of angels for the time being, thanks so much, and would gladly trade every one of them if it meant that her very human man could be back again. Even if he had to be inhuman to accomplish it. Beth breaks her promise just long enough to flick a glance Mick's way and is not shocked to discover that he's meeting her gaze. She wants to not blame him, but apologies stick like glass shards in the back of her throat.

"Come on," Carl says, at her side before she even has a chance to register that he's moved. "You look like you need to be away from here."

Beth laughs and then puts her hand against her mouth as her throat starts to burn, aware that people are staring at her. The girlfriend is allowed to behave tragically at the funeral. It's in the rule book, and anyway: most of the people there are either from the police station or the DA's office, and they know that she, Carl, and Josh have a past.

"Been a long time," she says.

"Yeah." Carl squeezes at her forearm. His eyes are still large and brown; after over a year, he's able to look at her with warmth again. "I'll even buy you a drink, but only the first one. After that, you're on your own."

Beth makes another sound. This one's not a laugh. It's not quite a sob, either; she did enough of that over the past three days to last her a lifetime. "Fair enough," she says. "But only if we go to Billie's."

Carl's hand on her arm loosens for a second. She sees him glancing towards the man standing in the shade afforded by the cemetery's too-nice trees, and she knows what he's thinking. "No," Beth says softly. Carl jerks his attention back towards her with an expression that would have been guilty on anyone else. His face wasn't made for guilt. He had that in common with Josh.

"Billie's," Carl says. "Sure. For old time's sake."

The leather seats in his car feel warm behind Beth's back as she gets in. Carl has taken care to park in the sunshine. If the two of them were on the kind of terms to ask such questions of each other any longer, Beth would wonder just how well he knows the city that he guards.

*  
It's a cheap job, Beth tells herself. It's a stepping stone. She does this so that she won't hop in a circle on the sidewalk and complete the trifecta of breaking her heel, breaking her ankle, and making a fool of herself in one fell swoop. After all, these are the best heels that she owns. They won't be the best heels for long because she has herself an honest-to-God _job_, after all, and one that will surely be leading to legitimate journalism in just a few months. In the meantime, she can write about celebrity drug busts as if they matter with a smile, and do a dance with every penny that she manages to subtract from the principle on her student loans.

Beth gives her steering wheel one final, congratulatory smack before she exits the car. It's the same battered Taurus that she's had since she was a senior in high school, and right along with thoughts of wriggling out from under those student loans, she's thinking about new wheels. Hey, a girl has to keep her priorities in order. Beth allows herself one little skip as she pushes open the familiar glass door to the diner and slips inside. It's already crowded, neighborhood dinner rush, but that's just fine. Her boyfriend has been holding a table for them.

"Hey, baby," Beth says as she leans into the booth and kisses him. "Did you shoot any bad guys today?"

Carl makes a pleased sound and twines his fingers through her hair before he kisses her back. Beth likes the way that he always cradles the back of her head when they kiss, like he's going to drink her down. "No," he says when they part. "I tried to work 'Stop in the name of the law!' in a few times, but that's not nearly as cool-sounding when you're twenty-seven as it is when you're eight."

Beth grins and slides into the booth opposite him. The Formica is slightly greasy beneath her fingertips, even though she knows that the waitress cleaned the table before Carl came in. Billie's is the kind of place where even the air will be slightly greasy right up until the moment when it's torn down. There's a bar against one of the walls, and Beth is in a mood to celebrate, but not quite yet. She leans forward, grabs at Carl's hands, and lets her grin get even wider. It's on the verge of eating her entire face.

"I got the job," she says.

Carl pauses, and for a moment looks so classically dumbfounded that Beth could almost flick him. "Hey, I _did_ go to school for four years in journalism," she feels like saying, but then Carl's expression dissolves and she realizes that it was all a show to begin with. His grin is nearly as big as hers. "You got the job," he repeats.

"I got the job." They've been here so many times before that Beth doesn't even need to read the menu, but she grabs for it, anyway, just so that her fingers have something to do so that she does not fly into pieces with joy.

Carl makes a suppressed noise from the back of his throat. It takes Beth a few seconds to realize that he was about to whoop right there in public and only barely held it back in time. She puts her hand against her mouth to keep back her own laugh and squeezes at his arm instead. "That's my girl!" Carl exclaims. He leans forward and kisses her again. "That's my girl. Taking journalism by storm."

Beth blushes. The offices had been amazing and screamed cutting edge from every appliance and decoration on the wall, and her desk was huge, but the New York Times it still wasn't. "Well, if by taking journalism by storm you mean that my first piece, 'Brad and Angelina: Can They Go the Distance? Our Readers Weigh In' is due Monday," she said. "It's, um, not exactly weighty reporting." A fact that her new boss seemed oddly proud of, and did so with such charisma that Beth found herself wanting to believe it, too.

Carl makes a dismissive gesture. The waitress comes up before he can finish his thought and he says, "Two steaks, one medium and one medium rare. We're celebrating."

"Make one of them chicken fried," Beth says quickly. When Carl arches his eyebrow at her, she says, "I'm eating grease in the land of tofu and pilates. That's celebrating."

"What the lady says." When the waitress goes, Carl turns back to her. "When I first joined the force, I spent more time babysitting drunk and disorderlies than I did stopping real criminals," he tells her. "You pay your dues, and then you move up to the bigs. It'll work out."

"I know. And in the meantime, the internet there is faster than my apartment." Beth can't stop herself from doing a squirmy dance in her seat.

"I think that I actually have one of your drunk and disorderlies on the books for Tuesday." Beth jumps and experiences a brief moment of horror as she realizes that someone probably witnessed her being a spaz. She turns in her seat and sees a tall man with dark hair and striking eyes smiling at her and Carl both. It's all that Beth can do not to drop her head into her hands. "Sorry, it looks like you guys are having a special moment, so I won't intrude for long. I just wanted to say hi." Beth can't shake the feeling that special moment really is referring to her dance.

If Carl gets that feeling, too, then he's being very careful not to show it. "You're prosecuting my misdemeanors?" he asks.

"He wrapped his Prius around a tree and then blew a 1.5 two weeks later."

"Ah." Carl holds up a finger to Beth. "See, first you pay your dues, and then you get to be there for these special moments."

"I'll be sure to keep that in mind until I can write real journalism again," Beth says. She glances over her shoulder at the man, who appears to be picking up an order to go. "Work friend?" she asks.

"Yeah. He just joined the DA's office a few months ago." Carl shrugs. "Knows his stuff."

"Huh." The waitress brings their food, and it's all that Beth can do not to swoon at the sight of that much gravy. She can sense Carl struggling not to laugh at her and says, "When you're a woman in LA, you're only allowed to eat food like this so many times in your life. I swear that there's a scorecard on Rodeo somewhere."

"The secret lives of women," Carl says. He pours on steak sauce and doesn't notice that Beth glances back over her shoulder, but the doorway is already empty.

*  
Beth hasn't been to Billie's in over a year. It seemed wrong, somehow, and after Beth knew that she had done something powerfully not right to begin with, one more line seemed as if it was asking the universe to forgive her for too much. So she stops, shocked and even appalled, when she sees how _empty_ it is. When she and Carl had come here regularly it had always been crowded, even at two in the afternoon; they had eventually worked out a strategy where they flipped coins to see who had the pleasure of showing up twenty minutes early and securing the table. When she and Carl step through the door, there are only two occupied tables in the place, and even they look as if the diners are already wishing that they had somewhere more pressing to go. The interior design is different, too, sleek metal and sterile white paint where it used to be waitstaff who were as much fixtures as the chairs and tile that it took Beth six months to realize wasn't really dirty, was just colored that way. She stops.

"A lot's changed," Carl says, and there's a dry humor to his voice that definitely wasn't there the last time that they spoke. Beth still feels like crying.

"Can I put in my protest now?" she says. They're both wearing black and she's sure that her mascara is covering half of her her face. While that might have been okay in the Billie's that she and Carl used to frequent, she can feel all eyes on her in this new, improved version.

"The management is always taking suggestions." It's not Carl, but it's a bright young thing with a menu who has crept up on them both without their notice. Beth jumps hard and wishes that she was in any kind of mood to be embarrassed.

"Right," Beth murmurs, as Carl says, "Can we sit at the bar?"

"Um." The bright young thing looks from Beth to Carl and finally seems to realize that the two of them are in the middle of a moment. "Sure. I think it's open."

She's being diplomatic. It's barely three in the afternoon, and the bar is empty. Beth doubts that anyone drinks this early unless they're doing it as a career, or unless they've just watched dirt fall down onto the man they loved until there was nothing left to see. And the ones who do it as a career usually don't go to places as nice as this.

Beth slides onto a stool, anyway, and barely even rests her elbows on the new, smooth marble before she's dropping her head into her hands. "Do they even still have beer here?" she mumbles. It's a bad plan to drink in the state that she's in, probably. Beth is overwhelmed with how little she can bring herself to actually care.

"Something way outside of our pay grade, I'm sure." Carl takes a moment; Beth can feel him bracing himself beside her. "How did Josh die?" he asks finally.

Beth's entire body goes stiff. She can feel it. She raises her head from her hands and says carefully, "He was shot."

A bitter half-smile twists Carl's face. "Do you know you get this...just this look, whenever you're not telling the whole truth?" he asks her.

*  
The Formica feels greasy beneath Beth's hands. That could be because her palms are sweatier than normal. She tells herself not to be stupid: Mo wanted her to find a reputable source so that the story would sound a little classier than the site's usual fare, and she had specifically required that it not be a source that Beth was currently dating. It turned out that Mo did have some boundaries in the pursuit of breaking the hit counter, after all. Beth was sure that she had walked away from the conversation looking faintly dazed.

Now, on the other hand, she's sure that she's looking faintly guilty. Billie's is a public place, she tells herself. More to the point, it's a _familiar_ place, one where she and Carl have been seen together dozens of times. If she was actually trying to step out on him, surely she would be smart enough to do it in a more discreet manner?

When she's actually able to have internal arguments about how stupid she is or is not being, Beth ultimately decides, then something has gone desperately off the rails in a fundamental way. The booth has her trapped.

"You know I can't give you more than the official sound bite," Josh says. He lifts his shoulders. "Open case. If the guy did it, then he deserves an unbiased jury."

There's a part of Beth that sense uncertainty the way that a bloodhound can pick up just a few molecules of a person's scent. It made her a pain in the ass when she was a child. Now, Mo writes her a paycheck for it. "So you think that he might be innocent?" she asks swiftly.

"No." Josh answers so quickly, and for a second so fiercely, that it startles the both of them. He pauses for a beat before he goes on. "No, I am absolutely sure that he did it: that's not how it works. It's just that, as a part of the system, I have to assume that I might be wrong. And if I'm wrong, prejudicing a jury could get an innocent man convicted." Josh gets a sheepish look. Beth is struck by how boyishly charming he looks as he wears it. "It sounds corny, I know, but I'm here to protect the system as much as I'm here to protect the victims."

"It doesn't sound corny," Beth answers him. "It sounds very noble." She hopes that every waitress in the place is staring at them both and registering how very not over the line that their meeting is. She hopes that they can then convince the part of her which is convinced that it's starting to get there, and still doesn't want to leave the booth.

"You have a beautiful smile, did you know that?" Josh asks her.

*   
Beth knows that she has allowed her silence to go on for too long, but her brain has also been struck completely free of thought. She coughs finally, shakes her head, and looks down at her hands. "That's a pretty damned awful thing to say," she answers Carl without trying to cut away at the truth of the statement. "Maybe being a cop makes you cynical about human nature-I know that being a reporter does-but--"

"I don't think that you had anything to do with his death." Carl sounds horrified to even consider the prospect. Beth is glad of it; there were a few seconds in which she was confronting the possibility that Carl's opinion of her really had fallen that low.

"Thanks for the compliment."

"I still think that you're lying, though." Beth cuts him a swift, sharp look, finally starting to get angry, but Carl rides it out without so much as a flicker of an eyelash. He's seen her angry before. "There it is, right there. That look. Why do I get the feeling that you could explain a lot more about the weird things that happen in this city, and the way that a certain private detective manages to wind up thigh-deep in all of them, better than the LAPD could with an entire forensics team?"

Carl is staring at her very hard, and it's making Beth's body start to feel cold all over. She keeps her lips stubbornly clamped together so that she won't do what she has wanted to do ever since she watched the ambulance load Josh's body up and drive away with the sirens turned off, which is tell someone, anyone, everything that she knows just so that she won't have to be the only one to carry it any longer. _It wouldn't be right to Mick,_ Beth tells herself. Funny, she always starts thinking about right and wrong again at the very end.

"I'm a reporter, Carl," Beth says in a hot tone. "People tell me weird things all the time, just because they think that I have a better chance of believing them. Maybe Mick is the same way: he picks up weird cases just because there's a better chance that he'll be able to do something about them. I don't know."

Carl is still giving her his suspicious look. It occurs to Beth that all three of them-herself, Carl, and Josh-were wrapped up in careers which required them to have an almost perfect ability to read people. She was kind of starting to wish that she went the usual Hollywood route of the up and comer and dated out of work actors, frankly, so that she would be with someone too self-absorbed to notice anything out of the ordinary about her.

"Nothing ever changes," Carl says finally. There's a twist to his mouth that is bitter, bitter.

*  
Beth squirms around and thinks that she would like to bolt from the booth altogether. They haven't ordered anything other than coffee, so it's not as if she would be leaving a bill that could not be handled by throwing a few dollars down on the table as she fled. The idea of asking Carl to cover a check right now makes Beth feel as if her entire body has been doused in ice water, as does the thought of eating anything for the next day and a half, much less with him.

_I think that's called guilt, sweetheart,_ a voice inside of Beth says. She's good at ignoring it; she's been ignoring it in larger and larger doses for the past month.

Carl has leaned back in his seat with his arms folded over his chest, and is regarding Beth with a face so perfectly, artistically blank that she can read any emotion that she wishes onto its surface. She knows him well enough to know that the blankness is deliberate, that he's rendering himself unreadable so that he can process some deep emotion that she's no longer allowed to share with him. Beth has a fair idea what that deep emotion is. She takes a deep breath.

Before she can speak, though, Carl says softly, "Usually, when you break up with somebody, it's common courtesy not to have someone else already lined up-or in play."

Beth's inhale in preparation for speech becomes sharp, as if Carl has slapped her. "I'm not seeing anyone else," she says. "Carl, I would never."

"Don't fool around with two men in the same line of work, Beth," Carl says, and he suddenly looks exhausted. Beth stares at him and wonders just how much emotion he has really been able to hide from her over the past month, if he's so fundamentally unsurprised now. "I've seen it a dozen times: it always gets back one way or another."

She and Josh have kissed a few times, always fumbling and quickly broken off. It's not--Beth tells herself that it's not like Carl is making it sound with the weary contempt in his voice, it's not like they've been sliding away to motels under the cover of darkness. There's a difference.

"Carl, I didn't mean for this to happen," Beth says, because she didn't, and only a few seconds later realizes that it's a terribly guilty thing to say for someone who keeps telling herself that her conscience is clear.

Carl has a way of twisting his mouth when he does not even know how to cope with a person any longer. He gives Beth that twist for the first time since she has known him and says, "I've heard that a dozen times, too."

*  
Nothing ever changes. Carl's words leave the air faster than they're able to leave the inside of Beth's head. She looks down at her hands again and realizes that this was a terrible idea, an awful idea, and if she wants to grieve with someone then she should have chosen any of the dozen friends that Josh had who didn't share a romantic connection to her. She doesn't know what perverse urge drove her to choose Carl again out of all of them.

Beth lifts her head and stares instead at the dramatically altered surroundings which prove that Carl is wrong and says, "It's not my right to tell you," she says finally. Carl is so surprised to hear it, and inclines towards her so suddenly, that Beth thinks he's going to fall off of the stool if he is not careful. "Someone could get hurt if I do."

"Mick St. John?" Carl's voice is eager enough to remind Beth that they're both in lines of work that require ferreting out the truth from unwilling subjects, too. For a moment, she wonders how she, Josh, and Carl ever managed to deal with each other. "Beth, being a PI is not as dangerous as you--"

"Being a DA isn't supposed to be that dangerous, either," Beth interrupts him in a soft voice. It's a cheap shot, but Carl still falls silent. "It's not my story to tell or my risks to take, Carl. It's as simple as that. Josh was killed by bad men with bullets. Scenario you've seen a dozen times."

"More than that," Carl mutters. He sounds tired. It occurs to Beth that maybe he's lost a friend, too, that he was able to close gaps with over the past year far better than he and Beth ever managed, and that he's grieving every bit as deeply as Beth herself is. She starts to put her hand over his arm, only to let it hover awkwardly before she drops it back to her side, unsure of where the boundaries between them are drawn now. "You know, he loved cheap beer and trashy sports movies. For someone so goddamned smart, I never could figure that out."

Beth lets out a snorting, startled sound that maybe wants to be a laugh. She knows: she still has half of a six pack in her fridge and several DVDs that he was going to pick up the next time that he came over. "And he hated John Grisham," she says.

"Loathed," Carl corrects her. "I believe that loathing is the correct word."

"Loathed," Beth accepts. "But he would read almost anything else. I never knew a man who read as much as he did."

Carl makes a snorting sound, a hybrid laugh that doesn't quite get there, so similar to Beth's own of a few moments before that it startles her. "Even when he was preparing for a case," he says. "I never could figure out how he managed to avoid getting his ass handed to him at least once."

"Being brilliant," Beth says softly.

Carl looks at her before he says, "That helped." She's not quite sure what he means before he's going on. "Hated Thai food, too. Couldn't even stand the smell of it..."

*  
Beth is a little drunk and a little better when she makes it back to her apartment a few hours later. She locks the door behind her, starts to shrug off her coat, and then pauses when she sees that the red light on her answering machine is blinking. There's only one message, and on a day like today it could be anyone offering up their condolences, but Beth knows somehow without needing to listen that it's not. She stares at the blinking light for several long seconds with her coat half off before she makes up her mind and slowly walks into her bedroom without pausing to listen. She's been told that most people don't exit one relationship and have another one already lined up and waiting for them. Beth rubs her hands over her eyes and picks up a book that is not hers on the way to the bed, tells herself that she'll pour the cheap beer that she could never stomach the taste of down the sink tomorrow. Tonight, she'll let them stay.

End


End file.
